What might seem like a relatively easy ask on paper – the director of a buzzy festival hit adapting a Jo Nesbø short story with three likable and attractive actors set on the camera-ready island of Crete – has become a bizarrely effortful slog in the misshape of Killer Heat, a dull and predictable sunshine noir that wastes the time of those involved as well as ours.
Originally known as the far more appealing The Jealousy Man in print, the anonymously retitled mystery plays less like a real movie and more like a case-of-the-week episode of an ITV crime drama (without credits it’s not even 90 minutes long). Joseph Gordon-Levitt, revisiting similar yet considerably lesser territory to his role in Rian Johnson’s stylish 2005 thriller Brick, plays a run-of-the-mill private detective named Nick who is called to investigate a seemingly cut-and-dried death on a Greek island. Leo (Richard Madden) has fallen off a steep mountain edge while free-climbing, a reckless accident to most but to his sister-in-law Penelope (Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden co-star Shailene Woodley), it looks like murder. She’s married to his identical twin brother and at the mercy of his wealthy, and dangerous, family.
Nick’s by-the-numbers investigation then begins, aided by some really rather heinous, at times parody-level, voiceover (“Sometimes you use a carrot, sometimes you use a stick, sometimes you just lie your ass off”) as flashbacks to his past as a jealous husband, to a cruelly underused Abbey Lee, hint at something deeper at play.
Depth, however, is not one of Killer Heat’s strong points, the mystery unravelling with such a formulaic lack of surprise that we’re convinced something twistier and more unusual is being kept for the finale. But the trudge to get there is without reward, as if we’re being punished for being dumb enough for sticking with it, and the final reveals are pretty much exactly what one would expect from the synopsis, almost comically so. This would maybe be less egregious if there was something else here to engage but it’s all so boringly pedestrian from start to finish. The private dick, the femme fatale, the smoldering husband, the mob matriarch, all speaking in cliches in rushed scenes that never allow any of them to transcend stereotype. Woodley fares the best, adding some emotional weight to her dialogue, treating the material with a humanity that’s otherwise absent. Gordon-Levitt is closer to a Leslie Nielsen parody but without any jokes, also devoid of smart tricks and charm, while Madden is left to a repetitive cycle of clenching his jaw and squeezing his biceps.
It makes for a head-scratching follow-up for director Philippe Lacôte, whose imaginative and unconventional prison thriller Night of the Kings was a critical hit after a Venice premiere back in 2020. Aside from brief glimpses of beautiful scenery, this is as drably made, horribly lit and creatively uninspired as streaming films come, made more distracting by characters insisting on a luxury we never get to see (Woodley teasing an extravagant party is hilariously followed up by a few people milling around on a small boat).
Thanks to the refundable shoddiness of 2017’s The Snowman (a film that was released essentially unfinished), Killer Heat will not go down as the worst Nesbø adaptation out there but it will definitely be the most forgettable.
Killer Heat is now available on Amazon Prime
